Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II
- Raekwon
- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
88Like Ghostface's modern classic, this album defies hip-hop's current atmosphere of youthful cockiness and aging complacency: instead, it's driven by the sometimes celebratory, sometimes traumatized sense of stubborn survival and perseverance, a veteran mindset that can no longer picture success without having to defend it.
-
Raekwon pays further homage to his late friend’s memory by releasing a tour de force that honors both the legacies of Wu-Tang Clan and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.
-
It’s the often perfect synthesis between lyrical content and production on OB4CLII that makes the album simply sublime.
-
Only Built for Cuban Linx...Pt. 2 is top-to-bottom brilliant, and it's energy and emotion is too infectious not to inspire a dozen great hip-hop records to come.
-
All hotly (strangely this descriptor seems almost an understatement) anticipated albums should deliver so profoundly.
-
Fundamentally, though, the album is a wistful and occasionally melancholic one that is as consistently captivating in its lyrical content as it is wonderfully dark and eerily melodic in its composition and production.
-
The album drags at points; with 22 tracks and a 70-minute runtime, some of this material would have been better off on a mixtape. But that’s a minor flaw in an otherwise superbly-executed gangster epic.
-
Raekwon has not made a valid sequel to that classic--but he has quite validly added a couple hundred new bars to that performance.
-
90I love it the same way I love looking at signatures in my yearbooks: as distant reminders of past friends and better times. Sure, this album is awesome, but the fact remains that this is a continuation of an old idea in lieu of a new one.
-
90His timing, precision, and craftsmanship in regards to everything having to do with this project has been impeccable. It's not a classic. But it's damn close.
-
100Everything about Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Pt. II demands worship and solidifies Raekwon as one of history's best with a continuation that exceeds his original debut in every way imaginable.
-
One can't fairly make the claim that "Pt. II" picks up right where the original left off, but this is the best Raekwon we've heard lyrically and musically in a long time, and barring a late entry this should be the best Wu-Tang related album of 2009.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 30 out of 31
-
Mixed: 0 out of 31
-
Negative: 1 out of 31
-
LennyM.0
-
10
-
10